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Spring Garden Results

The spring garden I planted has been completed harvested and replaced by some summer vegetables, which I will post about later next week. I thought I’d give you a quick summary of how the onions, broccoli, and Brussels sprouts did, along with the herb garden (which is still in place). As you can see from the picture above, in just 7 weeks, everything got a LOT bigger than I thought it would. Adding the potting soil and peat moss as I mentioned in my previous post really helped compared to last year’s garden. I’m pretty sure I planted the broccoli way too close to each other, and I know I did so with the Brussels sprouts. I had 9 Brussels sprouts plants and had to pull up and get rid of 3 due to overcrowding.

I picked the first 2 heads of broccoli and the first onion on May 18th, so it took about 2 months for the broccoli plants to grow and produce a large enough broccoli head for picking.

I went a few days without checking on the garden, and caterpillars were scarfing down my Brussels sprout leaves. It became a constant battle making sure caterpillars stayed off the Brussels sprout plants and broccoli leaves.

After 2 months of no sign of a single Brussels sprout forming along the stalks of the plants, I finally pulled them up and got rid of them, replacing them with some of the extra bush-style green bean plants that had by then been planted in the other garden bed.

I did plant the spring garden rather late, so the broccoli plants only produced one crown of broccoli each. I was a little disappointed in that since it was just enough to do one recipe of my roasted broccoli.

I did finally harvest the onions as well. They were a lot smaller than I thought they’d be, but it could be partially my fault since I didn’t stay on top of watering the garden often. I didn’t get a picture of the onions before chopping them up and freezing them for use in soups later. All of the onions I planted yielded 13oz total, so that was disappointing. But, it was my first time growing onions, so perhaps I’ll have better luck next time. It could have been the variety I used as well.

The herb garden I planted was doing amazing 2 months after I planted it. The parsley and dill were going crazy, but the basil wasn’t doing so well. You can’t even see the basil in this picture below (behind the parsley) because it hasn’t grown tall enough yet. I think the basil was slow at getting started because the Brussels sprout leaves were blocking the sun. Once the Brussels sprouts were gone, the basil started doing much better.

I will do a separate post next week regarding this year’s summer garden.